to be honest the only reason i still read sinfest anymore is because of the sisterhood.

even though im not entirely happy with how tat treats them as characters most of the time, theres a lot of room for improvement.... but i am just so disillusioned and uninterested in literally everyone else at the moment (except maybe hovering fembot <3 but shes unlikely to become a hugely recurring character any time soon, so no point in putting my faith in her as a character)_________________

Joined: 30 Jan 2013Posts: 1106Location: Chamber of the House of Lords, Palace of Westminister

Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2014 12:04 am Post subject:

Being perfectly honest here, I'm really not very big on dramatic, serious stuff. I like my plot light and not really all that important. My favorite strips are the joke strips where nothing of great importance happens.

But as long as Tat is doing big dramatic plots, I do prefer he continues them, and hopefully, eventually concludes them._________________Good day, good people!

Wait, we're all huge fans of Mr. Ishida and his writing? Did I miss some kind of memo?

I'm following this coming pretty much for two major reasons:

1. I'm very curious about the personal development that would inspire Mr. Ishida to take such a radically different direction and why they didn't just start a new comic instead of aggressively changing the one they had. I'm generally in agreement that it's all a bit heavyhanded and I'm not sure what in particular is the comic's message if it suddenly decided it has one. I don't think I could ever defend the writing quality of this comic, but I definitely think Mr. Ishida's got balls to take the direction he did. I think his heart is in the right place and the comic certainly never bores me so I'm glad to have it to read every day.

2. I love checking the forums and seeing a veritable parade of dipshits using the comic's change of direction as an opportunity to soapbox about feminism and ignorantly opine about the state of the world more generally. They never seem to realize the forum in advance itself isn't full of straw feminists like they assumed it'd to be and that they're not going to get the stress relief they presumably came to get. They then wind up beaten over the head with their own assumptions and driven to either apoplexy or complete descent into paranoid (or sometimes even racist) babbling. That never ceases to be entertaining, probably moreso than the comic itself.

(One of my favorites are when you get people saying what amounts to "Did Tat wind up getting some kind of feminist girlfriend who poisoned his mind?! THAT EVIL TEMPTRESS!" and then protest when they get labelled as a misogynist, somehow completely missing that their thought processes automatically lead them to default to blaming a woman that may or may not exist.)

I'm pretty much with you on this, and have noticed the #1 most popular theorized reason is very sexist indeed. I wouldn't claim to know why but if I were forced to hedge a bet I'd say it is much more of a mid-life crisis thing. Tats has always liked seeming radical and progressive, which was easy in the Bush era. Every liberal, radical or moderate, could unite under hating that dick and his administration, so for a time things were good. Then Bush was out, Obama was in, and Tats got swept up in Obamarama. When that turned out to be a let-down (at least compared to the hype, Obama's still a good president given the circumstances) he needed to look somewhere else. He's in his mid-forties, he needs meaning to hold his life together and I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume he doesn't have (and possibly doesn't even want) a wife/partner and kids to fill the hole. So he chose a cause, and won't back down from that cause so long as it gives him the sense of satisfaction that other people in general probably don't.

yes, the comic is bizarrely and sometimes obviously some sort of psychological output, yes he uses the comic as an anvilicious broadcast of ideology.

but that's pretty much all we know and there's little reason to suspect any kind of tell-all from a reclusive artist is forthcoming that would give us any real answer above breathless speculation. so why bother with ouiji board teareadings that 'ah, his present ideological obsession derives from his needing to fill a personal void left by obama!' or 'if tatsuya has no wife and kids to hold his life together, he substitutes feminism to have life satisfaction!'

speaking as a person who is entirely guilty as charged as being a serial eye-roller at the comic and definitely spent some quality time blatantly overanalyzing the comic's psychological overhead: yeah no no more going out on limbs please

Re another Sisterhood member, it occurred to me: Clio's an African-American with a chainsaw. In slasher films, where killers frequently wield chainsaws, it's (stereo)typically the African-American who gets killed first. Clio is a living anti-slasher film. The closest thing the strip has to a slasher film villain is Torture Guy, sort of the embodiment of porn...which Clio has taken on as her particular nemesis.

Aha. I knew that I remembered compiling a list of "super-heroes" seen in the strip over the years and then forgetting all about it (that means it's a few years out of date but what are you, paying me for my services?).

So it's a super-long post, please deal with it.

***

The countdown has begun. The day of reckoning is at hand. The final battle in the epic struggle between good and evil has...possibly come...maybe. The Beast shall wake and banish light. Rapture. The Final Showdown. Ponies. Maybe zombies, who the heck knows. Soon all humanity...all life on Earth...will be no more. Sudden armageddon with a vengeance. An epic day. The world, it shalt be rocked. And other obscure references to previous strips.